Cutting 3D storefront abandonment for small e-commerce merchants
12
user interviews
04
prototypes
32
walk-through tests
26
user flows
Overview
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Ethereal Engine is a browser-based 3D engine that makes high-quality, multiplayer experiences across VR, AR, and the web.
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After its acquisition by Infinite Reality (now Napster), it became the company's flagship product with a bold goal: democratizing the spatial web for small e-commerce businesses, similar to how Squarespace made website creation accessible to everyone.
Product acquisition lineage
The Challenge
52% of users drop off at the Editor Tool, making the Dashboard to Editor transition the largest point of abandonment.
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Business owners found Ethereal Engine's Unity-like editor too complex to use on their own, leaving a major gap between the product's potential and the people it was built to serve.
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Leadership believed that creating a step-by-step e-commerce set up flow would generate more clients.
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The product required Shopify integration alongside Napster's AI agent technology.
Original Editor userflow and drop off rates
Gathering Insights
To understand the product space, I researched Shopify's integration capabilities and various existing merchant onboarding patterns to understand the guardrails and opportunities within that ecosystem. A competitive audit of tools like Squarespace and Shopify's own setup flows helped define what "simple" looked like for non-technical users at scale.
Key Findings
1. Familiar e-commerce patterns reduce perceived complexity of 3D setup.
2. Template-first approaches lower friction for non-technical merchants.
3. No existing tool bridged Shopify stores and 3D experiences.
Design Process
By grounding every decision in user impact, I mapped out our design trajectory with stakeholders across product, engineering, and business, while pulling a cohesive glassmorphism visual language from the Napster 3D Spaces Redesign so users moved between both experiences seamlessly.
Initial sketch of product placement concept
AI Agent Integration
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Midway through, the company rebranded to Napster, which meant integrating the Napster AI agent into an existing setup flow without disrupting the layout.
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Knowing Napster's feature offerings would only grow, I designed a library upfront to organize them, avoiding a full redesign down the line.
2D ➞ 3D Product Conversion
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I integrated Rodin, an AI model that converts 2D images into 3D models, making the shopping experience feel native to the space.
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Since Rodin charges per conversion, I built a credit system around it: 20 free conversions to start, with the option to purchase more, creating a natural upgrade path within the product.
MVP flow
The final MVP flow delivered a cohesive Web3 Shopify integration that seamlessly fit into Napster's product suite.
Results
What i learned from this project
Next Steps
For future iterations, I plan to:
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Conduct a feedback workshop with current clients actively using the product to surface pain points directly from the people in the workflow.
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Run A/B testing across navigation approaches to move beyond assumption and land on patterns backed by real usage data.